In 2011, the Union and the USA signed the Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) between the United States of America and the European Union in civil aviation research and development. The cooperative activities carried out so far under the MoC mainly address air traffic management (ATM), in particular cooperation in the field of research and development between the parties' ATM modernisation programmes SESAR (EU) and NextGen (USA).

Cooperation under the MoC, in particular between SESAR and NextGen, has reached a high level of maturity and has delivered important results in terms of promoting global interoperability of ATM systems. This led the two parties to explore the potential for extending the scope of cooperation to topics relating to the deployment of ATM systems. On this basis, the Council authorised the Commission on 8 May 2017 to negotiate with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the USA an amendment to the MoC to extend its scope to the field of deployment.